A great many speaker-independent voice user interfaces (VUI) have recently been developed for various electronic devices. Such user interfaces require language configurations in several languages. Some manufacturers' speaker-independent speech-recognition systems nowadays support up to tens of languages.
Due to the devices' limited memory properties and the limited processing capacity of speech-recognition systems, all languages cannot be included in a single package totality, but they must be divided into smaller language packages. If too many languages were to be arranged in a single data package, this would reduce the accuracy of the speech recognition. In addition the ‘training’ of the acoustic speech models can then be optimized for several language areas, which will achieve advantages, for example, in the recognition of different dialects. Each language package can include several languages, the number of which can be, for example, 4-10 languages. Language can be arranged into language packages, for example, according to a geographical division into regions. Due to this, the language package to be used must be separately selected for the user interfaces of the device, for example, for a voice user interface, which language package is subsequently used, for example, in speech recognition.
The languages that are characteristic of particular geographical regions, for example, can be arranged into separate language packages. In addition to these languages, the language packages can include some widely spread and general used world languages (for example, English, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian), which for some reason may be wished to be included in several language packages. According to this division, each supported language is included in at least one language package while some languages are in several language packages. In this case, and in this application in general, a dialect of a language can also be understood as a language.
Multi-language systems are, at present, still quite rare, due to which only quite rough means of implementing the selection of a language package are known in the prior art. In these, users must themselves decide and select manually from the device's user interface the language package to be used at each time. However, this has the weakness that this allows the wrong language package to be selected, which can lead to poor performance of the speech recognition. In addition, if the device is not notified at all of the speech language, the operation of the speech recognition will be even poorer.
The language package selection presently carried out by the user is subject to error. One example of this is a situation in which, for example, a Russian user wishes to use, for example, German as the VUI language (i.e. the language by which they wish to control the device by speech) and Russian as the user interface language (i.e. the language that is used, for example, in the graphical user interface GUI of the device). As German is a global language, it is arranged in several language packages and the user will then have several alternatives from which to select a language package, which in itself can lead to undesirable discomfort in the usability of the device.
Users who do not understand the often rather cryptic significance of the language packages and their contents may select the German for use in speech recognition, for example, from the Central Europe language package. This selection will prevent the user from selecting, for example, the Russian they desire as the user interface language, because for reasons of appropriateness it has not been regarded as necessary to include Russian in the Central Europe language package. Such a situation may thoroughly confuse the user and make them incapable of re-selecting a language package. Generally, it is not particularly user-friendly to allow such a situation to arise.
Further, there may be even large regional differences in the pronunciation of world languages that are spoken in several different regions. For example, Slavs pronounce English differently to native English speakers. A similar typical difference also exists between, for example, the German spoken by Swiss/Austrians and that spoken by native Germans. This too may lead to the wrong language package being selected and the subsequent ‘faulty’ operation of speech recognition and in turn also of the voice user interface.
One state of the art is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,917,484, in which the language to be used in an electronic device is selected, particularly in the case of a computer. This solution, however, in no way deals with voice user interfaces or the speech recognition functionality used in them, in which the problems described above are considerable. Also, in WO-publication 2004/019207 A1 (Nokia Corporation) has been described the prior art relating to the user interface language setups particularly for editing of the language sets. Therein either is not discussed about the language package selection problems that relate to the voice user interfaces.